Unity makes strength
The revolution on the streets of Sofia
On Monday of this week and Wednesday of last week, there were protests in my home country, Bulgaria. They were against the 2026 budget plan (as one poster read: a first-grader could write a better one), but mostly against the corruption and covert dictatorship. Against the current government, which is stealing from people, stalling progress, and leaving us no other option but to emigrate. Our motorways are in a dire and lethal state, our hospitals have the air of concentration camps, our teachers are paid less than the clerks in grocery stores. Our judicial system is so wrecked that it can be used in textbooks to show why there’s a need for checks and balances and what occurs when there aren’t any: people who have no allegations against them go to prison and stay there, and criminals roam the streets freely and rule the country. We’re tired of it all: of the ugliness on the streets and in the boardroom, of the shame when friends from abroad come to visit, of our money going in the pockets of a single man. We’re so tired that we’d almost given up.
Until last night. What happened on the streets of Sofia on Monday night didn’t feel like a protest, it felt like a revolution. The energy was propulsive and electric, and I felt something I have never felt so strongly before in my thirty years of life. Namely: the power of unity, the power of the collective spirit. It’s not by chance, perhaps, that our national motto is ‘unity makes strength’.
For a long time, I used to believe that change, even political, could only happen inside-out, as opposed to outside-in. That if we wanted to change the world, what we needed to do is do the work on ourselves first, one by one – healing our trauma, accepting our shadows – and that this will inevitably reverberate outward and change our external environment naturally. Our external world reflects our internal one. To a large extent, I still stand by this. I do believe that if Trump and Putin and Peevski and Borissov had gone to Stephen Grosz for psychoanalysis as children, we wouldn’t be where we are today. And that this would have been far more productive for the mutual healing of all than just putting them in prison now (preventative vs. punitive).
But, I have also realised I was wrong. That withdrawing inward and turning our backs on the problems in the outside world is easy, lazy, and ignorant. That when we’re conscious and awake, our responsibilities extend to society and to our countries. That the symbiotic relationship goes both ways – our world cannot fully thrive unless we heal ourselves, but we also cannot thrive in a world where evil and crime and dishonesty reign. As Irene Calremont de Castillejo writes, “When we are lent wings we should not reject them.” Because if not us, then who? If not now, then when? Our consciousness and intellect is a grace, and it is through our service that we express our appreciation for it.
Trying to move through the ocean of bodies on the yellow cobblestones of Sofia’s city centre last night, with the loud booing and jeering and chanting around me, the sound of vuvuzelas and whistles, the goosebumps on my skin, I also couldn’t help imagining something else. People on the streets last night were united by anger and injustice. They were there because they felt passionate disapproval, hatred of the status quo. And I was proud of them for it. Because anger also means hope. It means expectation. It means belief in change. The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.
But observing all of it, I couldn’t help but imagine what would happen if we didn’t unite only when everything is on the brink of collapse, at the treat of imminent danger, but regularly. If we didn’t only unite to fight the bad, but also to celebrate the good. If in a different context, those cries of hate, were cries of praise. I’ve never experienced anything like it, concerts are as close to a positive collective spirit that I’ve come. But last night, squeezed between strangers, while my heart levitated in my chest, I felt viscerally the endless, reverberating, all-conquering power of united energy.
We don’t need to see the full road ahead. We just need to come together, like this, more often.
To Reality
With Love,
